the ripples of us

i.  the kids and I take long walks through camp and up and down the beach. on good days i remember to bring bags and we pick up trash the whole way. jamin loves to pick up trash. cora loves to pick up rocks. it is always an adventure to see what we find. sea glass counts as treasure, but freshly broken glass is a hazard. time changes everything. the weirdest thing we find consistently is those little individual flossers. so many of them. why? I have no metaphor for discarded flossers on the beach.

ii. we drove eric to the airport today. he is somewhere in the air between philadelphia and orlando right now. his grandfather is dying. we started the summer with eric's grandfather in the hospital, then things improved, but now it is hospice and the end is close. it feels sad. it feels complicated. it feels lonely and inconvenient to be so far away. I am in new york and eric is in florida and somehow no one is where we belong but everyone is right where they should be. because how can we be anywhere else than exactly where we are supposed to be? at least that is what I keep telling myself in between deep, shoulder-scrunching breaths: "I am exactly where I need to be."

iii. rabbit and kitra visited. we did fun things and showed off island life, but mostly we just reminded ourselves why we all like each other so much. I need reminders of what my life looks like at all these different angles. I need to see my life through someone else's view, too, and rabbit is so good for that. she loves us, all of us, and she sees us all so differently than the way I see us. and she brought sc peaches and grits and we had biscuits twice while she was here. definitely a good visit.

iv. we keep making plans that just keep getting jumbled, but that is when the best things happen, right? I think we are going to travel. eric bough a roundtrip ticket, so eventually he will come back to new york. then we will go see some things before we go home. it seems silly not to poke around new england since we are right here. and once we are home, we're just...home. I need to camp. I need to explore places I don't know well. I need big trees and beaches where the view is ocean, not bay. I need to feel small and clean and capable and wild. I need to relearn myself. I need space from summer so I can decide how I feel about it. or not. maybe I already have everything I need.

v. we can see the stars better here than we can at home. I do not understand how this is possible. it seems like on the mountain so far from town our light pollution should be far less than here on shelter island. we see a shooting star almost every night. we made sure rabbit saw one while she was here. I think we all just wished for home, in all the ways we know it. one night after watching for stars on the deck eric and I slipped down to the waterfront to swim in the dark with the last of the staff. we all left glowing trails in the water as we swam through the bioluminescence. we made our own shooting stars. plenty of wishes for all.